Artista-alquimista / Artist-Alchemist
by Victor Gorgulho, 2024
Solfejo – Solo Exhibition
CAIXA Cultural Brasília
As a singular kind of “artist-alchemist,” the Rio-born Felippe Moraes (Rio de Janeiro, 1988) employs the most varied artistic media, means, and material resources in his work, presenting us with a vast — and always cohesive — body of work that ranges from neon sculptures to photographs, as well as videos, installations, sculptures of varying scales, performances, and beyond.
Such a dimension of an “artist-alchemist,” as mentioned above, alludes to an unexpected objectivity and pragmatism with which Moraes’s production is imbued in the making of his pieces. If, on one hand, “alchemy,” a certain “mysticism,” beliefs in epistemological systems that fall outside the bounds of the contemporary Western lexicon — moreover, these are precisely the aspects the artist chooses as fields of interest in his own daily life.
I therefore restate the paradox: this so-called “artist-alchemist” draws nothing from the figure of the Romantic artist, whose centuries behind him and the many more still ahead quickly become a sign of paralysis and fear, opening the way to readings that are poor, deterministic, and at times rather shallow about the zeitgeist of our times.
Moraes operates, however, in the opposite direction: if the work of art is labor, the artist combines his manual virtuosity (being equally capable of drawing, painting, and performing many other such functions) with his often sharp theoretical research into subjects that span a broad spectrum of interest — not only to Moraes, but of relevance to all of us who, gathered here, form (even against the will and denial of many, in these times) a collective body, a social body, endowed with a collective imagination, agreements, disparities, ruptures, and alliances.
By usually identifying issues that broadly and notably pertain — considerably so — to the human experience as a whole, we understand that the artist reaches out, through small, trivial, and sarcastic gestures, to any being alive on planet Earth.
Perhaps this is where much of the artist’s generosity resides: in several of his works, he summons the viewer (or many viewers) not merely to interact with or touch his works but, rather, to join the artist in commanding them, deciphering them, raising them, investigating them, using them as formal-poetic-theoretical apparatuses capable of leading us to the other side of a river; a river that is full-flowing and dispersed, diffuse, deep, and strangely also so shallow, which we call the contemporary era.
Victor Gorgulho
2024